Marko Gasic: The ‘Russian Threat’ Is An Excuse To Increase Military Spending

International affairs commentator Marko Gasic says that poking the Russian bear until it escalates into aggression is simply a way for the government to easily enlarge the military industrial complex and increase military spending. Scaring the population makes it easier to confiscate their money in the name of safety.

RT spoke to Marco Gasic,an international affairs commentator, who thinks Pence’s trip is part of a US strategy to provoke a Russian reaction. RT asked Gasic if Russia is the biggest security threat to the Baltic, as Pence claims. Gasic’s response was not alarming, but it definitely makes sense.

Mike Pence’s description of Russia as being the greatest threat is something straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 in which the peoples of Oceania were invited to hate the peoples of Eurasia. With Oceania, of course, being today’s NATO pact led by Washington and Eurasia being Russia. The problem for Mike Pence is that Russia is not being aggressive enough. In fact, it is not being aggressive at all. The strategy we are seeing now by the US administration – in fact by the neocons in the US administration – is to get closer and closer to the Russian bear … until it finally becomes aggressive. And then to turn to the world and tell to the world “Look, we told you so.” That is the strategy; it is not working very well. But the US has a twin-track approach. If it doesn’t do anything else, it will scare other countries to spend and scare its own population to agree that spending on domestic budgets should be on weapons as well. If nothing else, the idea of Pence’s strategy is to justify more spending and more benefit to the military-industrial complex. –Marko Gasic

The US attempts to present Russia as a threat to the world which requires a great deal of military spending and weapons spending to stop is in many dimensions. We have a diplomatic offensive by Mike Pence; we have the economic offensive of the Senate’s sanctions against Russia designed to be institutionalized in perpetuity. And we also have the media manipulation through these absolutely groundless, evidence-less accusations constantly repeated like the best propaganda, the big lie of Joseph Goebbels of Russia’s supposed interference in the US elections. The nature of the interference is never specified but is always repeated like a mantra. This is a triple-pronged approach to demonizing Russia. And in all of its aspects, it is a very unfair approach because the Russians have been characterized by a great deal of moderation on the part of Mr. Putin and his government, and we see no evidence of aggression from Russia. We do see a great deal of evidence of aggression from the US and its encroachments of Russia’s strategic geopolitical space.

The sanctions are not designed to help anyone on the planet apart from a military-industrial complex. The idea is for Russia’s difficult position to be institutionalized to make Trump’s desire for rapprochement with Russia an impossible one. The aim of these sanctions is to lock American policy into interminable neocon warmongering direction from which nobody can escape. And anyone who opposes this direction is again by association accused of being with the enemy.

Political games at the highest levels are playing out right before our eyes. Everything Gasic says makes a lot more sense and is much more feasible than the Russian enemy narrative ever did. This isn’t the first time the US needed an enemy either. We are constantly inventing problems so the government can bomb people and steal more of our money in the name of safety.